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Mark Reiterates Mir Will Have First-Class Driver Support

06-10-2014, 03:30 PM

Phoronix: Mark Reiterates Mir Will Have First-Class Driver Support

Mark Shuttleworth is hosting his keynote right now for the latest Ubuntu Online Developer Summit. Mark mostly talked about Ubuntu Phone, the forthcoming BQ phone hardware, Unity 8, OpenStack, LXC / Docker, and cloud computing in general... During the question and answer period, he was just asked about Mir driver support...

Of all the various complaints about Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth (most of which I think are petty), Mir strikes me as the worst. Mark has never given a good reason why we need Mir, and it just looks to me like a lot of wasted resources are going into this proejct that would be better applied to helping Wayland. Unlike Apple and Microsoft, Linux developers are not swimming in money, and really can't afford to spend a lot of resources reinventing the wheel.

Comment

Of all the various complaints about Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth (most of which I think are petty), Mir strikes me as the worst. Mark has never given a good reason why we need Mir, and it just looks to me like a lot of wasted resources are going into this proejct that would be better applied to helping Wayland. Unlike Apple and Microsoft, Linux developers are not swimming in money, and really can't afford to spend a lot of resources reinventing the wheel.

I agree. There is nothing about Mir that is better than just working with and modifying Mir for their uses. The community would have greatly benefited from all that work Ubuntu put into Mir. Instead we have a fragmented display server environment.

Ubuntu with Mir. and everyone else working on Wayland.
Hopefully it will be easy for driver support on both platforms.

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I am more worried about applications. Toolkits aren't perfect (especially if support for Mir is not mainlined), and even if they were they can't cover every possible use-case. There are going to be display server-specific bugs, which aren't going to get detected because many if not most devs won't be able to test their apps against Mir. And there are going to be parts of apps that have to talk to the display server directly, and many of those probably will not work at all on Mir.

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This is not really an issue. The reality is that developers who are targeting Ubuntu already need an Ubuntu build and test environment, certainly if they are doing professional development this will be the case. Sure, there might be some developers who have personal objections/hate Ubuntu, and refuse to install it, but could you imagine telling your boss (or client):

It would not be professional. On the other hand, hobbyist developers can choose to support whatever platform they want. They are free to choose not to support a particular platform, and accept the consequence that their product will not perform as well, or be as popular, on that platform.

Comment

Of all the various complaints about Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth (most of which I think are petty), Mir strikes me as the worst. Mark has never given a good reason why we need Mir, and it just looks to me like a lot of wasted resources are going into this proejct that would be better applied to helping Wayland. Unlike Apple and Microsoft, Linux developers are not swimming in money, and really can't afford to spend a lot of resources reinventing the wheel.

the re-inventing, I mean. You picked mir but the OSS world is full of half-baked, replicated solutions and apps. Even the desktops- who needs so many ? I am sure the lame answer is choice, except when the choice is offered by someone that threatens my house of cards.

If wayland is considered an improvement over xorg ( and I strongly disagree with it, primarily because the same people are doing both and are making the same mistakes ALREADY and what is worse, wayland is still not used by most projects anyway), then Mir is xorg done right. I agree with Mark's notion of an API driven driver, rather than a collection of implemented protocols. In both cases implementations can vary but at least they can be externalized. One only has to look at the popularity of direct X and direct 3D APIs- if its design was anything like X or wayland, it is unlikely to have become popular. Apple's platform benefited from coco and openGL.

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I agree. There is nothing about Mir that is better than just working with and modifying Mir for their uses. The community would have greatly benefited from all that work Ubuntu put into Mir. Instead we have a fragmented display server environment.

Ubuntu with Mir. and everyone else working on Wayland.
Hopefully it will be easy for driver support on both platforms.

We ALREADY have a fragmented "display server" platform, without Mir. Can you easily explain to anybody how the display stack works on linux ? And how many paths of direct and indirect rendering a client invocation can make ? And in how many places and libraries the implementation is scattered ?

I think that with an API driven approach that Mir is taking, the driver support will be better, as has been with windows (direct 3D, draw, X etc). Besides, it is unlikely to be affected by kernel upgrades or as is the case now, with (xorg) library changes.

Comment

This is not really an issue. The reality is that developers who are targeting Ubuntu already need an Ubuntu build and test environment, certainly if they are doing professional development this will be the case. Sure, there might be some developers who have personal objections/hate Ubuntu, and refuse to install it, but could you imagine telling your boss (or client):

It would not be professional. On the other hand, hobbyist developers can choose to support whatever platform they want. They are free to choose not to support a particular platform, and accept the consequence that their product will not perform as well, or be as popular, on that platform.

Absolutely. Ubuntu is too big in the Linux world to be ignored, personal dislike for Ubuntu may make some developers stop developing for Ubuntu but I dont think there will be too many of those, especially not with professional developers who need to target the largest Linux distribution. And if Ubuntu phone and tablet make any success that will certainly be an additional incentive to develop for Ubuntu with the convergence story. It will take some time before any native Wayland/Mir applications come, both Wayland and Mir will probably depend on XWayland and XMir in the beginning. Your example makes a good point, any development that does not target Ubuntu loses a lot of potential users and customers. And I kind of doubt that it is much more work to make an application run both on Wayland and Mir, though I am not a developer so I dont know for sure. Ubuntu SDK will likely help development for Mir. For me the more important question is when will Wayland and Mir be fully ready for the desktop.